Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute has chosen Life Technologies Chief Executive Gregory T. Lucier as chairman of its board of trustees.

Lucier assumes the role at the institute’s board meeting today. Lucier, who has been chairman previously, takes the place of Duane Roth, who died Aug. 3.

As chairman, Lucier will help the institute with its new 10-year plan. It calls for speeding basic biomedical discoveries to patients, and forming more partnerships with health care entities and drug companies.

The nonprofit Sanford-Burnham has a $153 million annual operating budget, making it one of the largest research institutes in San Diego. In addition to its La Jolla headquarters, the institute operates an East Coast location in Orlando, Fla. It employs about 1,200 people.

Independent research institutions like Sanford-Burnham traditionally draw sharp distinctions between themselves and for-profit companies, Lucier said. But with a slowdown in anticipated federal funding from the National Institutes of Health, closer ties to drug companies can help compensate.

“Coupled with pharmaceutical companies facing pretty severe patent cliffs, there’s a blurring of the lines where collaborations are starting to happen in ways that are going to be new and novel,” Lucier said. “Our goal is to make Sanford-Burnham the best partnering organization in the world.“

Lucier said he took the role in honor of Roth, and because he agreed with the institute’s new plan, which he helped create.

“I had spent time with Duane prior to his passing about his aspirations for Sanford-Burnham, and I felt when they asked me to rejoin the board that I had a good sense of where they wanted to go, what Duane wanted to achieve,” Lucier said. “I deployed some of our strategic planners from Life Technologies to help out.”

The plan calls for Sanford-Burnham research to find precise disease causes, and discover potential treatments that target the cause. In large part, this means the use of genomics, he said. Lucier is intimately familiar with that field through Life Technologies, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of DNA sequencing equipment.

“I think the vision is right, I think the leadership is solid, and I wanted to do what I could to get us down that 10-year path,” Lucier said.

Lucier takes over while Life Technologies is in the middle of its own transition. Life Tech is in the process of being acquired by scientific instrumentation giant Thermo Fisher. The $13.6 billion deal was approved by Life Tech shareholders last month.

It’s expected to be completed early in 2014. Lucier said said he would determine his future plans after that time.